Preston Wilson wants us to listen to our coffee beans to get the perfect roast.

Acoustic researcher Preston Wilson normally spends his time studying underwater sounds. But, like many of us, Wilson often relies on coffee to keep him energized. He’s enough of a coffee connoisseur, too, that he roasts his own beans. And he noticed that the sounds those beans make while roasting give away where they are in the cooking process. These clues, he thinks, could be harnessed to perfectly time a light, medium or dark roast’s preparation.

One of my five-year goals is to live in a place where I can safely roast my own coffee beans. I’ll have to keep this suggestion in mind when the time comes to try it.

As we talked about last week, Coffee Rust continues to ravage the Central American coffee crop.

To make matters worse, Brazil is experiencing an ongoing drought. Combined, they are exacerbating the coffee market. As a result, as Joseph Stromberg reports, we will all be paying a lot more for our coffee very soon.

It’s taken a while for this to be reflected in the retail price of coffee, because roasters generally have a few months’ stock of beans on hand. But we’re finally beginning to see slight increases in retail prices of coffee too.

Those two crises are bad enough, but what can we expect in the future? [Read more…]